Blogging about life, culture, the economy and politics, i.e., stuff, since December 2012

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Common Core Has Got to Go

I have serious, indeed enormous concerns about the consultant industry driven Common Core curriculum that has been imposed top down from the know-it-alls in Washington DC on my three kids here in Bozeman, Montana.

Common core was implemented this year. To this point my kids' teachers are obediently taking the edict seriously. It is not going well. Common core specifies in gratuitous detail what kids should learn, the linear order in which they need to learn it and when that all must occur. It is teach to the test on steroids. My kids are excellent students but this is not how they learn and operate. As probably comes to no surprise to readers of this blog, they know how to think for themselves. They thrive on exploration, discovery and opportunities for creativity. My kids, like most, progress on different dimensions at different times in different ways.

Common core is cook book, educational sausage stuffing in its design and execution, and most assuredly does not accommodate, allow for or respect the outside in, right brain learning style that is prevalent in my household. Nor, ultimately, does common core promote and encourage higher levels of learning. Us right brained get it, but we don't get it in the same way or the same step-by-step measured linear pace as our much more numerous left brained brethren. I like to think that when us right brained break through we are all the more better off because we see not only the individual pieces but also understand how they knit together.

Common core is so enveloping and controlling that it is causing daily strife and anxiety for our kids in the Bozeman schools. I totally support and believe in public schools. But the impacts of this tyrannical policy are leaking back into our household to the point where, if the insanity continues, we will yank our kids out of the system.

I never thought I would have to make myself clear on this. But I am neither suburban nor am I a mom, though in Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan's mind, I fit the bill.

Arnee Duncan boxes out President Barack Obamaduring scrimmage on White House basketball court.

Duncan was previously best known for being a basketball playing Chicago chum of Dear President and falsely claiming, when the sequester went into effect earlier this year, that a hundred West Virginia teachers in a single school district had already received pink slips as a consequence and that 40,000 teachers nationwide would lose jobs as a result. Duncan was a loyal soldier in the Obama sequestration lie and deception machine. Now he mocks and stereotypes critics of his Common Core contraption.

"It's fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were, and that's pretty scary."

Arnee Duncan is one more Obama enabling hypocritical jerk (like so many he has a Harvard pedigree) who works like hell to deny others what he grabs and gobbles up for himself and his family. Take school choice for example. He toes the teacher union line in adopting anti-choice education policies for the masses but then sends his own kids to a choice school. In Duncan's case the choice for his kids was Arlington Science Focus School. Arlington Science Focus is on the north side of town where the limousine liberals live. When we lived in Arlington we resided and sent our kids to school on the south side of town among the Hispanics, immigrants, racial minorities and English as a second language crowd. In the phony liberal world of embracing diversity and harmonious equality, the science focus school (and curriculum) is open exclusively to the dominant rich white government executive, lawyers, lobbyists and contractor population in the north.

Barack Obama and his appointed minions are the most arrogant, hypocritical, dismissive and insulting louts I experienced in my 34 years working inside the Beltway. Thank you and good luck to all!

About Me

I had things I wanted to say and became tired of trying to force fit views by commenting on other people's blogs, so I started this enterprise. Contact me at gradyfosterone@gmail.com
Your comments are welcome. If they are relevant, and when negative, stick to sticking it to only to public figures and don't defame or invade anyone's privacy. I'll publish them.
Extended stories about life and family history are especially fun to write. We have the great fortune to have had many relatives who had prominent civic, professional, and/or political lives, which yields many thousands of references memorialized in press clippings and otherwise. I have received plenty of help from relatives who choose to remain unnamed. Those stories garner high readership. They are tagged with "Bathgate."
I would say my politics are libertarian leaning. I seldom vote for Democrats, and usually don't vote for Republicans -- I have been known to get writer's cramp in the voting booth.
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